Usefulness of rail guns

An EM gun is interesting, but with dumb kinetic projectiles it would be rather limited...

Modify the projectile to be essentially a flying engine... a scramjet... with some capacity to manouver, and you could be looking at the ability to shoot down hypersonic manouvering threats just from rate of fire... a 152mm gun with manouvering projectiles of 30-40kgs including engine and fuel with beam riding guidance perhaps... an incoming threat will be flying very high so the round could initially be lofted up high and then directed towards the incoming threat... launch 10 of them in rapid succession with a HE frag warhead to spread say 10kgs of fragments into the path of the incoming threat.

Use an AESA for guidance and tracking of target and projectile.

Obviously the initial velocity needs to be fairly high... say 3km/s and the scramjet maintains that speed as it climbs to altitude and then the projectile can roll over and accelerate horizontally... the incoming target will detect it is being tracked and will likely determine how far the radar is from the target... a good missile should be able to determine if the radar is near the target so whether the radar can be flown around or if evasive manouvers need to start...

The idea for the EM gun on the US ships was stupid... they need to take an existing gun type like a 152mm gun or 203mm gun and modify it into a hybrid to improve performance of currently used guns so whatever you end up making is widely deployed and used in numbers and has affordable ammo.

A joint venture with the Army to spread costs and increase production numbers is critical too to making it cost effective and useful... and indeed if the weapon is actually useful... a 152mm gun with a range of 180km for instance would be valuable for both Army and Navy... a 203mm gun with a range of 300km would be interesting too...

The technology and materials develop that need to be developed to make it work will have enormous value across the range of technology of vehicles... from electric drive tanks and armour to cars and bikes and trucks and buses and ships and planes and helicopters and UAVs.

Electric drive systems, super magnets, plasma handling... hydraulics (heavy dangerous dirty) could be replaced, the applications of this sort of technology can be very broad... it doesn't need to be ultra focused single use stuff... an EM cat can launch an aircraft through to a smaller much lighter projectile moving at enormous speeds but also all sorts of things in between and the electrics to drive it.

History is filled with technology breakthroughs from making weapons... the biggest drive for miniaturised computer technology was a lack of rocket motor thrust.
Imagine the progress and breakthroughs when the money is actually spent on making vehicles independent of fossil fuels... imagine solar power developing as far and as fast as computing power... well that is asking a bit much.

And before lasers the idea of death beams was stupid because any ray powerful enough to kill someone at a distance would surely kill the user first... but with research and money and time they have developed lasers and other directed energy weapons that would be suitable for what might have been considered impossible in the past.

The point is that right now they are likely delaying the production of their big ships... destroyers and cruisers... because they have introduced a lot of new technology on the Kuznetsov... something like a catapult but clearly not an EMALS yet, with talk from the company that developed it suggesting new electrical systems being fitted... hint hint... vague suggestion vague suggestion...

A new ship with vastly smaller and more compact power systems and managed electrical power systems should lead to quite a few improvements in performance and offer to provide power for all sorts of things... if not an EM gun then like some form of laser or maser... the first ones don't have to be perfect... they will be a generation ahead of the competition anyway.

There was talk of the Coalition 152mm gun using EM boosting and plasma propulsion to extend the range from 70km to 180km without reducing the shells size to unusable sizes...

AFAIK they already microwave the propellent to improve performance too.

Tanks got guns well after ships and have never carried anything anywhere close to some of the guns fitted to ships... the smallest they got for big guns was train mounted and they were ridiculous...